Interviews

World of Warcraft Arena Tournament Interview

GameSpy: How much are you having to think ahead for things that you'll be bringing to the game in the next expansion, and how much do you have to factor that in to what you're doing now?

Tom Chilton: It's a lot like the approach that we took with The Burning Crusade. We knew that adding ten new levels, and a lot of new spells and abilities to each class, and adding those new talents was going to dramatically change balance. It was going to dramatically change the feel of the classes, what they were strong against, not strong against, etc.

The way that we approach it is that the new stuff that we add has to be really cool, and within the reasonable limits of our balance expectations. During the alpha and beta process, we'll iron them out and try to end up with a balanced environment at the end of the day. We try not to hamstring ourselves when we're designing our level 70 and 80 spells and abilities, or when designing the Death Knight, we really try not to hamstring ourselves at all by current balance. We try to keep those things in mind, like if a class has a really glaring need for some kind of talent, then we'll keep that in mind. But we just try to bust out some really cool ideas for the class stuff and work out the balance from there.

GameSpy: I'm interested in something you just mentioned, the Death Knights. They've been described as the class that's going to be the two-hand Tank, the class that'll tank unlike any class before. But that's a PvE role, good luck tanking in arenas. What are they going to do in arenas?

Tom Chilton: We definitely have to think about the Death Knight from all the different angles. We are starting to crystallize in our minds, how good the Death Knight tanks. What they're good at, what they're not good at. We have the core Death Knight mechanics already worked out. Their core spells and abilities. So they'll be filling their own tanking role. But in the same way, in the back of my mind as we design it, we have to figure out that they have their role in arena and have enough tools to be effective there too.

GameSpy: So when you're developing new talents, like the Wrath of the Lich King 51-point talents, how much does arena come into the picture?

Tom Chilton: Well, we try to keep everything in mind. We try to make sure that as we're adding new mechanics, we think of them in terms of, "when would you use this?" And we try as much as possible to remember that a mechanic is stronger when you can use it in more, different situations. We feel better and better about it when it applies in multiple situations. What would you do with it in a raid group? In a five-man? When you're soloing? In a battleground or arena? So we do as much as possible to make sure that we give players an interesting set of tools to play with, and that holds as true with the 70 to 80 talents as it did with 1 to 60.

GameSpy: How satisfied are you with the layouts and physical setups of the current three arenas? And do you plan to create new arenas with environmental hazards or other forms of variety?

Tom Chilton: The arena environment can use more locations. We'll probably get a little more bold with some of those, and in some areas we may even simplify. For example, when we introduced Ruins of Lordaeron, it was geometrically more simple than the Blade's Edge arena. There are fewer line-of-sight obstacles than Blade's Edge. It was in a lot of ways a product of what we really liked about Nagrand arena and Blade's Edge, and trying to use that to make an arena that we felt a lot of classes would be happy with.

We'll probably try some new things, we'll add some new arenas for Wrath of the Lich King. Some may be a bit different from what we've seen so far.

GameSpy: I'd like to ask about the relationships between the design team and the player base. The raid designers have a very well-documented and public relationship with some of the world's top raiding guilds. Is there a similar segment of the player base that are involved with the arena and class designers, or that you keep tabs on? Arena Junkies, for example?

Tom Chilton: Yeah, I'd absolutely say that that's true. I always get feedback from different players that are pretty well respected in the arena community. One of our class designers is the guild leader of probably one of the most well-known PvP guilds in the world. I'll still keep him anonymous, though. So we definitely have those kinds of links in the community and we get feedback all the time. We definitely use that as a point of evaluation for all of our changes.